driver question

[David Gibson]

On Fri, Feb 15, 2002 at 11:18:50AM -0700, Prasad Venkata Boddupalli wrote:
> I just got to lay my hands on the document, "IEEE 802.11 Network Adaptor
> Design Guidelines for Windows XP". In that they talk about extended OID's
> that let us configure the card. For example, the description of
> OID_802_11_BSSID says:
> 
> ....
> Query: Returns the current AP MAC address
> Set: Sets the MAC address of the desired AP
> ....
> 
> Does it mean that Microsoft is privy to some of the firmware API's for the
> orinoco card. Or are they just placeholder's ? Can someone please throw
> more light on that.

I would be astonished if Microsoft did not have access to proper
programming documentation for the firmware.  Or more likely, their
driver is actually provided by Lucent/Agere who obviously have that
information.

> On Mon, 11 Feb 2002, David Gibson wrote:
> 
> > On Thu, Feb 07, 2002 at 12:32:21PM -0700, Prasad Venkata Boddupalli wrote:
> > > Hi,
> > >
> > > In our experiments, we have setup a WLAN using a single Lucent AP-1000.
> > > The AP is configured with 2 lucent Silver pcmcia cards with the same
> > > network name. Our mobile stations run on Linux kernel 2.4 and use the
> > > 'wvlan_cs' driver (version 1.0.6). In the above setting, we would like to
> > > issue commands (to the wireless interface of the mobile station) via the
> > > device driver to selectively bind to one of the two wireless interfaces on
> > > the AP. We tried issuing the command
> > >
> > >      iwconfig eth1 ap <mac address of one of the wireless interfaces>
> > >
> > > It should have forced the mobile station pcmcia card to bind to the
> > > specified AP interface. However, we realized that the operation was not
> > > implemented. So, we were just wondering if the above limitation is in
> > > the device driver or is it much more fundamental. If it's the limitation
> > > of the driver, we would like to implement it and hence would require
> > > access to the firmware API's and the card details. Are these details
> > > accessible to everyone and if so, where can we get them ? A search on the
> > > orinoco web site hasn't yielded the required documents.
> >
> > It's a limitation of the driver.  The limitation exists, because the
> > firmware API is not publically available, so the developers don't know
> > how to implement it :-(

-- 
David Gibson			| For every complex problem there is a
david at gibson.dropbear.id.au	| solution which is simple, neat and
				| wrong.  -- H.L. Mencken
http://www.ozlabs.org/people/dgibson